Mina Marefat is a registered architect, urban designer, and an architectural historian practicing in Washington and teaching at Georgetown University. She conducts and publishes original research on modern architecture and urbanism. She served as the curatorial advisor to the Guggenheim Museum’s 2009-2010 Frank Lloyd Wright retrospective in New York and Bilbao. Currently she is curator of a new traveling exhibition: Eero Sarinen: A Reputation for Innovation which opened Nordic Museum in Seattle in May 2012, then traveled to the A+D Museum in LA, the Atlanta Design Museum and the Kentucky Museum of Art and Craft.

As principal of Design Research, an architectural/urban design and research/education firm she has consulted on urban revitalization, cultural projects and green design. She has worked on urban parks, public spaces and streetscapes, integrating cultural heritage with redevelopment for the cities of Washington, Newark, Bam, Tehran and Isfahan as well as on architectural projects including hotels, offices and residences. Seeking to advance architectural education, Marefat initiates, plans and implements exhibitions, international exchanges, professional programs, conferences and workshops for global clients. She has collaborated with the Finnish Embassy, National Academy of Sciences, World Learning, the Library of Congress, National Museum of American History, the National Building Museum, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Dumbarton Oaks, Harvard University and MIT.

Marefat holds a PhD in architectural history from MIT; Masters degrees in architecture and urban design from Harvard Graduate School of Design and Tehran University. She was a Fulbright Scholar conducting research at the Fondation Le Corbusier in Paris and was the Rockefeller Scholar at the John W. Kluge Center of the Library of Congress, and held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Social Science Research Council, the American Research Institute in Iraq and American Association of University Women.